[erlang-questions] Erlang Extension Proposals (EEPs)

[Dominic Williams]

Hi Per, and everyone,

> In conjunction with the Erlang User Conference 2006 there
> was a workshop concerning the future development of
> Erlang.

I attended the workshop, and was very pleased about the
decision to have a process for language evolution. Thanks
for taking the initiative to get things moving.

> 1. We need to have some EEP editors
> 2. We need an e-mail address for the EEP editors, I have
>    suggested eeps@REDACTED
> 3. We need tools to generate html from EEPs. I have altered
>    some of the python tools to acheive this, but the
>    resulting script is very brittle and probably won't work
>    for most EEPs
> 4. We need a subversion repository to keep track of the EEPs
>
> The draft for EEP 1 can be found at:
>
> http://user.it.uu.se/~pergu/eep/eep-0001.html

I have read the draft and have several suggestions for
simplifying the process.

1) I don't see any use for informational and process
   EEPs. Let's just have plain EEPs.

2) The suggestion made at the workshop was just to use the
   erlang-questions mailing list. Why have a eeps@REDACTED
   address ? Let's keep the process open and simple. EEP
   candidates can just be posted to erlang-questions.

3) It was mentioned at the workshop that requiring an
   reference implementation might be too strict a
   requirement. It certainly seems to me that such a
   requirement rather shuts out the user community from
   being involved. Requiring a section /about/
   implementation suggestions or details should be
   sufficient.

4) There is a simple way to avoid completely all the hassle
   of having a special format, a version repository, using
   tools to convert to HTML and so on: just hyperlink to the
   erlang-questions archive. We just need a plain EEP web
   page, with a table roughly like this:

   N°    Title                          Status
   ---------------------------------------------------------
   1     Reified environments           Draft
                                        Final
                                        Accepted
   2     Whatever                       Draft
   ...

   Each "status" word would simply be hyperlinked to
   whichever post to erlang-questions had allowed the EEP to
   achieve that status.

   With such a scheme, several /existing/ posts in the
   archives could already be given draft status.

With such a simplifications, all we need to start are the
members of the committee. I think the open source user
community should be represented, maybe by voting for
a certain number of representatives ?

Best regards,

Dominic Williams
http://www.dominicwilliams.net

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